Dr. Tamara Chaplin
Tamara Chaplin is Professor of Modern European History and Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently visiting professor at the Université de Paris Panthéon-Assas (2024-2025). A historian of sexualities, gender, and the media in modern France, her research interests include queer identities, social justice, war, and human rights. Chaplin’s latest book, Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France (U Chicago Press, 2024) was completed with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Camargo Foundation, and UIUC’s Center for Advanced Study. Since its publication in December, Chaplin has given invited talks on the book at Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, and at King’s College at the University of London. She will be speaking this spring at the European University in Florence, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and the Université de Paris Panthéon-Assas in Paris, as well as in Toulouse, the Netherlands, and Denmark. A documentary film based on Becoming Lesbian is under development with filmmaker Olívia Pedroso.
Chaplin’s first book Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (U Chicago Press, 2007) examined the relationship between TV, high culture, and French national identity. Chaplin’s scholarship has appeared in French Historical Studies, the Journal of the History of Ideas, the Journal of the History of Sexuality, and in edited collections in French, English, Spanish, and Catalan. Her co-edited volume The Global Sixties: Convention, Contest, and Counterculture (with Jadwiga E. Pieper- Mooney), appeared with Routledge in 2017. A former professional ballet dancer and trained actor, Chaplin received her doctorate in Modern European History from Rutgers University (NJ) and her BA from Concordia University (Montreal).
Links:
Follow me on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/becoming_lesbian/
@becoming_lesbian
A University of Illinois interview with me appears here:
https://history.illinois.edu/news/2025-01-23t224334/untold-stories-women-france-professor-
chaplins-new-book-explores-nearly-lost
A Rutgers University interview with me in the Daily Targum appears here:
https://www.dailytargum.com/article/mhvsxe8ngul0-20250124
To register to attend a discussion of the book w/historian Andrew Israel Ross on the Society for
French Historical Studies’ podcast, French Presse, on Sunday, February 16, 9-10:30 CET (Paris
Time) go here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/french-presse-tamara-chaplin-becoming-lesbian-a-queer-history-
tickets-1222940139879
